Bøger i Penn Studies in Contemporary American Fiction serien

Herman Beavers offers a richly nuanced study of Ernes J. Gaines, James Alan McPherson, and Ralph Ellison as writers who have found ways to invest circumstances that might otherwise be seen as sites of squalor or despair with a sense of cultural vitality. He examines the Ellisonian themes and motifs the two later writers take up in their fiction, and looks at Ellison''s influence on the strategies they enact to construct themselves as American writers.For Beavers, the fictions of Ellison, Gaines, and McPherson are peopled by characters who value acts of storytelling and whose stories frame a fuller, more complex, and more inclusive version of American identity than those the dominant white culture has allowed.

"A strongly argued analysis and close reading of Delillo's works... There is much here in the methodology and discussion of postmodern themes and techniques that will have relevance to American studies and cultural studies more widely."-Forum for Modern Language Studies

This survey of 20th-century arts and ideas attempts to identify underlying epistemological, aesthetic and ethical issues. The author emphasizes how works from diverse media relate to one another and how their relationships affect the contemporary artistic and philosophical climate.

This book is a volume in the Penn Press Anniversary Collection. To mark its 125th anniversary in 2015, the University of Pennsylvania Press rereleased more than 1,100 titles from Penn Press's distinguished backlist from 1899-1999 that had fallen out of print. Spanning an entire century, the Anniversary Collection offers peer-reviewed scholarship in a wide range of subject areas.

"A major contribution to literary and cultural studies-bold, illuminating, and persuasively argued."-Karla Holloway, Duke University

John Barth and the Anxiety of Continuance will be of interest to scholars of American fiction and critical theory.

Refuting the theory that postmodernist art is essentially non-adversarial and apolitical, this monograph argues that a major current of postmodernist fiction can be read as a dissident response to capitalistic developments that have transformed the field of language and communications.

In Designs of Darkness, Arthur M. Saltzman examines some of the ways in which fiction has traditionally conspired to promote a goal-oriented vision of the work of art-and explores the ways in which postmodern (or postrealist) fiction consistently and unavoidably subverts the clarity of this vision.

Although published many decades ago, William Gaddis's The Recognitions is only now beginning to receive the critical attention it deserves. Carnival of Repetition, the first full-length study of the novel, is a sophisticated analysis that places it in a new literary and cultural context .

Addresses the postmodernist debate over the possibility and relevance of documentary and official histories. This work examines the struggles toward collective memory in a wealth of contemporary women's writing.

Alice Walker has described the Barbadian American novelist Paule Marshall as "unequaled in intelligence, vision, craft, by anyone of her generation, to put her contributions to our literature modestly." Such praise has echoed through reviews and analyses of Marshall''s work since the 1959 publication of Brown Girl, Brownstones, a novel followed by The Chosen Place, the Timeless People (1969), Praisesong for the Widow (1984), and Daughters (1991).Places of Silence, Journeys of Freedom is the first study of Paule Marshall''s work to focus explicitly on her contribution to feminism. It is also the first to identify one of her original contributions to narrative art-a technique of "superimposition" or "double exposure" through which her books have explored topics now at the heart of feminist debate.Centered around the subject of voice and silence, these issues include the interrelation between women''s power and powerlessness, the interpenetration of the political and economic world with the world of the psyche, and the mechanisms through which oppressions on the basis of race, class, and gender operate as mutually shaping forces.

"One of the most sophisticated studies to date of Native Amercan fiction... The writing is lucid and the argument coherent."-Choice

The novels of Paul Auster have captured the imagination of readers and the admiration of many critics of contemporary literature. In Beyond the Red Notebook, the first book devoted to the works of Auster, an international group of scholars provide a rich and insightful examination of Auster's writings.

In his book Beyond Suspicion: New American Fiction since 1960, Marc Chenetier analyzes the developments in recent American fiction, arguing that traditional generic approaches can be misleading.